My Thoughts on Rules for Writing Opening Chapters
How I approach the beginning of a novel.
There’s a lot of advice out there for fiction writers, urging novelists to anxiously adhere to various sets of absolute rules when composing open chapters. Never open a book with weather. Always introduce your protagonist on the first page. Beware adverbs, adjectives, and descriptions in general, because that’s just boring, apparently. People today supposedly have the attention span of a goldfish — sorry, TikTok user (I don’t wish to insult the intelligence of goldfish) — so throw the reader into something exciting straight away. Don’t use prologues. Don’t use first-person unless you’ve got an official “experienced author” badge. Don’t use present tense or you’ll upset Philip Pullman. You get my point: Lots of well-meaning advice, some of it useful as a guiding principle, but none of it warrants trumping an author’s instinct.
I’ve written over twenty novels, some of which have been self-published, three of which were traditionally published by a small indie US publisher, and I’m continuing to try for a mainstream publishing deal (extremely difficult, but I’m persevering nonetheless). Those are my credentials, such as they are, and I mention them purely to suggest that what I’m about to say should also be taken with a pinch or sack of salt, as you see fit. I don’t want…